FEAR
This short word of “FEAR” somehow touches about every aspect of our lives. It is a feeling of anxiety, agitation, uneasiness or apprehension of one thing or the other. It was an evil and corroding thread; the fabric of our existence was shot through with it. It set in motion trains of circumstances, which brought us misfortune we felt we didn't deserve. "But did not we, ourselves, set the ball rolling? Sometimes we think fear ought to be classed with stealing. It seems to cause more trouble."
A really great acronym for the word fear is "false evidence appearing real". The fears are associated with resentments. We asked ourselves why we had them. Wasn't it because self-reliance failed us? Self-reliance was good as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough. Some of us once had great self-confidence, but it didn't fully solve the fear problem, or any other.
God’s Will and Fear:
How do we get rid of fear? That's right - through prayer! We outgrow fear because through prayer, we're asking God to direct us toward His Will - to do His Work - to do His bidding. And notice what the prayer says," Not what He would have us DO, but what He would have us BE. We must go deeper than just changing out actions, because like we've said before, who we are and what motivates us will drive our thoughts and actions.
We are now on a different basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves. We are in the world to play the role HE assigns. Just to the extent that we do as we think HE would have us, AND humbly rely on Him, [then] does He enable us to match calamity with serenity. We never apologize to anyone for depending upon our Creator. We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength. The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage. ALL men of faith have courage. They trust their God. We never apologize for God. Instead we let HIM demonstrate, through us, what He can do. We ask Him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what He would have us BE. AT ONCE, we commence to outgrow fear."
The man who fights life’s battles with out fear fights one enemy-the real thing confronting him. But the man who fights with fears within him fights 3 enemies:
1. The real thing to fight.
2. The imaginary things built up by fear.
3. The fear itself.
And the greatest of these is fear. Fear is what looses from within itself the enemies that capture us within before the real fight with the outward enemy begins. So boiled down to its essence, the conclusion is that there is nothing to fear save fear, nothing to worry about except worry.
Resentment = wrong judgments, Fear = wrong believing, Harms = wrong actions.
That which we fear grows in proportion to our obsession with it. The more we fear a thing, the bigger it becomes, which in turn increases our fear. How lucky we are that our God/ Higher Power await our call for the strength, the companionship that is guaranteed us! We are in partnership, all the way, every day, if we'd only recognize it. We can move toward and through anything. And the added benefit is that we come to trust our partnership. We soon know that all situations can be met. All experiences can be survived. Avoidance is no longer our technique for survival. Fear is reduced to a manageable size with the help of God. It also deflates the power our fears have given it.
Resentment is like taking poison and expecting the other person to get sick.
Fear is the faith that something bad is going to happen.
Thanks for anger, because it reminds me when I'm angry what I do to myself.
It is not that anything changes; it's just that we get a new pair of glasses that are in focus, and when we take a look at everything through the spiritual glasses, we realize everything has been fine all along. The problem was that our vision was distorted. It was distorted because we were looking at everything from a position of self-centeredness; we're looking at the universe with us at the center. From that perspective, everything was screwed up. No sooner we become more God-centered or love-centered or others-centered, peace of mind becomes our constant state.
Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.
The things we are afraid of seem to be like high mountains to climb. When we have gone through them they were in fact small speed bumps.
Short Prayer
Is it possible that fear is a conscious decision? If I am trying to make myself "un-self-centered", isn't that still being self-centered?
It is not” cleaning your room by rearranging the same old stuff you've always been stuck with", think of it as "cleaning your room by throwing out the stuff you don't want so you can replace it with stuff you DO want".
The way you are is NOT the result of what has happened to you, it's the result of what you decide to Keep Inside of you. Why not spend all that energy in overcoming the one single enemy of the human race: fear?"
Forgiveness:
At a certain point, we forgive because we decide to forgive. Healing occurs in the present, not the past. We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not giving in the present.
Fear is only an illusion. It is the illusion that creates the feeling of separateness, which is the false sense of isolation that exists only in your imagination.
If I totally, at the depth of my being, trusted God, I would never experience fear. So my fears and anxieties reveal my current agnosticism.
It's not what’s going on around me that makes me feel the way I'm feeling, it’s what I am thinking about what’s going around me that makes me feel the way I'm feeling. And when I change the way I'm thinking about what's going on around me, my feelings toward them also change. Every time I have a negative emotional reaction, I am always telling myself something about what's happening. And if I have a negative emotional reaction, whatever I'm telling myself is always a lie, and all I have to do to stop having these negative emotional reactions is to become aware that I am telling myself a lie, and the moment I know I'm telling myself a lie, I stop doing it. And then I stop having the negative emotional reaction. It sounds complicated but it isn't. Of all judgments that I can make about what's going on, I'm always telling myself one or the other of two lies whenever I am angry, disappointed, annoyed, afraid; whatever.
1) This should not happen, or
2) This is terrible/intolerable/unacceptable/I am unable to live with this.
There is only one cure for resentment - detachment. The detachment that comes from attachment, whole-souled attachment, to the One Who loves even the "unlovable" and the "undeserving" of love. Our attachment needs to be on God and God alone. And since God is love, we get over resenting someone by loving him or her!
Non-consideration of our character defects (Lower instincts) is every bit as self-destructive as denial of them. Admission of them is what's called for. But non-sharing of them with another human being makes it impossible to experience the maximum experience of feeling ashamed of ourselves that gives the maximum hope of wanting to be rid The self-willed person is engrossed in the love of worldly pleasures and of them all. It is necessary that we extricate from an examination of our personal relations every bit of information about ourselves and our fundamental difficulties that we can. Since defective relations with other human beings have nearly always been the immediate cause of our woes, no field of investigation could yield more satisfying and valuable rewards than this one. Calm, thoughtful reflection upon personal relations can deepen our insight. We can go far beyond those things, which were superficially wrong with us, to see those flaws, which were basic, flaws that sometimes were responsible for the whole pattern of our live. What we are searching out is not only the behavior that we see as unproductive, but also the very nature of that behavior. Does that behavior stem from fear, or from resentment, ignorance, defiance, or from a need to retaliate because others have treated us unfairly?
Through the process of "uncover," "discover," "recover," we progress into deeper self-knowledge and acceptance. This process allows us to uncover long-forgotten incidents. "When we hate our enemies, we give them power over us - power over our sleep, our appetites and our happiness. They would dance for joy if they knew how much they were upsetting us. Our hate doesn't harm them at all, but turns our days and nights into a hellish turmoil." No matter how much harm we feel has been done to us, and how much we feel our anger is justified, our job now is to take our eyes off the microscope and pick up the mirror. We are responsible for our own actions and reactions, we have no power over anyone else's actions or emotions, nor do we want them living rent-free in our heads. Lord knows, we have enough work to do on ourselves without muddying the water with other people's behavior.
"You know, I feel I've really been betrayed."
"Now that your perception has been validated, and your very understandable pain has been acknowledged, it's up to you to accept that unpalatable truth, and get on with your business of making a new life. You must relinquish the gratification of justifiable anger leading to fear.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we subconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
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